Berlin Holocaust Shrine Stays With Company Tied to Nazi Gas

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Published: November 14, 2003

BERLIN, Nov. 13—
The trustees of the huge Holocaust memorial planned for the very center of Berlin decided Thursday to continue with construction even though a subcontractor in the project was once involved in making the poison gas used in the Nazi death camps.

The decision essentially reverses an earlier agreement regarding the German chemical giant Degussa, a subsidiary of which, a company named Degesch, made Zyklon-B, the gas used in the death camps to kill millions of Jews and other people.

After a stormy meeting two weeks ago, the trustees halted work on the project when Holocaust survivors complained that Degussa's presence in the project was unacceptable and would prevent them from visiting the memorial.

But in the meeting on Thursday, the trustees decided, without taking a vote, to resume work on the project, which covers an area the size of two soccer fields near the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin.

''It was a very intensive discussion, and we made a difficult decision,'' Wolfgang Thierse, the chairman of the board of trustees and speaker of the German Parliament, said in a press conference after the meeting. ''We decided to carry on construction of the memorial under the current agreements and with all the firms who had contracts.''

The earlier decision of the trustees, which was not to use an anti-graffiti chemical manufactured by Degussa, had kicked off an intense discussion in Germany and among Jews abroad over the appropriateness of excluding a firm for actions that it took three generations ago, when the people who ran it were entirely different from those running the company today.

It was widely agreed, also among many of the trustees, that Degussa had an exemplary record of examining its past and in making restitution to the victims of Nazism.

The problem deepened a few days ago when new information revealed that a current subsidiary of Degussa had supplied a concrete-thinning agent used in the memorial's foundation, which raised the possibility that the work done so far would have to have to be undone and the entire project started from scratch.

Mr. Thierse said that the decision to continue the project with the original subcontractors, including Degussa, was taken on both moral and practical grounds. To start over -- especially if it involved tearing out the slabs already installed, and finding an anti-graffiti agent manufactured by a company with no history of collaboration with Nazism -- would have been very time consuming and prohibitively expensive.

''It could have endangered the whole project,'' Mr. Thierse said.

In addition, some trustees argued that it was pointless to single out Degussa for special responsibility in the Holocaust when many other German companies had histories of past collaboration with the Nazis.

''It was a matter of accepting the fact that it is a very complex matter to remind people of the terrible past,'' Michael Blumenthal, the former United States Treasury secretary and a member of the board of trustees, said in a telephone interview.

''The people in the firm today are not the same as the people in the firm 60 years ago,'' Mr. Blumenthal said, referring to Degussa. ''Many of them have faced the past, and the Memorial is being built precisely to help people face the past.''